Chapter Four
The renewal of hostilities on the Eastern Front on 18 February 1918 was most welcome news for Russia’s Allies. That Russia might sign a separate peace with Germany had been the Allies’ nightmare since the failure of the offensive in June 1917. Over the summer British policy in Russia had been to prevent this by working for co-operation between Kerensky and Kornilov. Alexis Aladin, who had returned to Russia in the summer of 1917 and became actively involved in the work of those liberal politicians seeking to prevent Kornilov taking hasty dictatorial action and hoping to engineer the formation of a Kerensky–Kornilov alliance, acted in accordance with British policy. During the First World War Aladin had worked for the British government on other occasions, putting his experience of revolutionary politics to particular use on a visit to Ireland in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916. The British did not back Kornilov. When it became clear Kornilov was moving against Kerensky’s government and not seeking simply to transform its composition, the British were not impressed: the ambassador Sir George Buchanan was asked by Kornilov’s most loyal industrialist supporter Putilov if British armoured cars could be put at Kornilov’s disposal; Buchanan politely refused, pointing out that such an enterprise was bound to fail and could only strengthen the Bolsheviks.1
Although Britain’s military representative General Alfred Knox was more proactive in support of Kornilov, his actions never strayed beyond Buchanan’s clear guidelines. Knox did pay for the production of the pamphlet Kornilov, the National Hero distributed during the Moscow State Conference, and did not object to the frequent visits to the British military mission of Zavoiko and the Kadet officers like Colonel Golitsyn. But, while just before the coup attempt he urged Kerensky’s War Cabinet to let Kornilov have a free hand in restoring the army, during the coup he went along with the official British line asking Kerensky to seek an accommodation with Kornilov. British officers in Russia were aware of Kornilov’s plans, indeed Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson and Major-General Sir Charles St Leger Barter, the British Military Representative at GHQ, were active participants in its early preparations, but their reports to London of an imminent coup prompted the firm rebuke; they should keep out of politics. The British line was clearly for reconciliation between Kornilov and Kerensky.
During the Kornilov affair Sir George Buchanan became increasingly disenchanted with the liberal politicians who constantly sought his support. At the time of the Moscow State Conference he recorded in his diary his growing doubts as to whether ‘a purely Kadet and Octobrist government could do any better than the present one’. Kerensky was far from ideal, but who could replace him, he concluded rhetorically.2 He was thus receptive to a change in policy which began to emerge in the autumn of 1917. Increasingly policy-makers began to talk about the need to make links with patriotic socialist groups prepared to continue the war effort, referred to indiscriminately in British parlance as ‘Mensheviks’. This unlikely alliance between the world’s greatest empire and Russian patriotic socialists began with the mission to Russia of W. Somerset Maugham in autumn 1917.
In his later life Maugham always made light of his mission. There was indeed something faintly surreal about a British gentleman spy sitting in the European Hotel in Petrograd supping drinking chocolate with Professor Thomas Masaryk, the future President of Czechoslovakia, and holding secret planning meetings with his agents in the hotel bedroom of the patriotic feminist Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst. There was even an element of farce to the mission, when Maugham dashed from Petrograd to London with an urgent message from Kerensky to Lloyd George, arriving just after the Bolsheviks had seized power.3 Nevertheless, the mission set in train a strategy that was to dominate British thinking until November 1918.
The Maugham Mission
The idea of intervening in Russia by cultivating patriotic socialist groups had been around in embryo since the late spring of 1917 but was first clearly formulated by Maugham. All versions of this idea, Maugham’s and all subsequent permutations, had two key elements: one was to involve all patriotic socialist groups, the key ones being Plekhanov’s ‘Unity’ Mensheviks, the Popular Socialists, and the right-wing SRs; and the other was to involve the Czechoslovak Legion and any other national armies which could form the core of a revived Russian army. Even before the abdication of the Tsar, the Russian Army had been recruiting from Czechoslovak and other slav national groups detained as prisoners of war after the capture of Austrian Army units; the largest such grouping by the summer of 1917 was the so-called Czechoslovak Legion.
One of the first to make this link was Bernard Pares, later Sir Bernard Pares, the founder of Russian Studies in British universities. In May 1917 he began working in Petrograd for the British ambassador Sir George Buchanan and in the course of his engagements to promote the war effort, got in touch with a follower of Plekhanov with whom he went on a ‘Unity’ speaking tour of the front accompanied by the former Bolshevik deputy to the Tsar’s Duma of 1907 G. Aleksinskii; this tour included a visit to the headquarters of the Czechoslovak forces in the Ukraine. En route Czechoslovaks and Serbs were called on to help drum up support for the war effort, and Pares was willing to tell anyone who would listen of the fighting capacity of the Czechoslovaks he had met.4
So, over the summer of 1917 reports began to come back from Russia of the need to strengthen contacts with both patriotic socialists and the oppressed slav nations. Maugham’s involvement in such matters was more or less accidental. He had worked as an agent in Switzerland from the autumn of 1915 to the summer of 1916, but had then given up the service, visited New York and toured the South Seas, before settling in America in the spring of 1917. There, towards the middle of June, he was contacted by an old family friend Sir William Wiseman, head of British Intelligence operations in the United States, who proposed the idea of a mission to support moderate socialists and ‘keep Russia in the war’. This was to be a private mission. He was not, at first, expected to contact any British Intelligence officers in Petrograd and his activities ‘could be disavowed if necessary’. Maugham agreed although, unlike for his work in Switzerland, he did ask to be paid.5
On 20 June Maugham had his first meeting with E. Voska, who headed the Intelligence Department of the Czechoslovak National Council which had helped British Intelligence penetrate the murky world of New York émigré groups. Maugham was to head a group of four Czechoslovak activists, Voska, Reverend A. Koukol, J. Martinek and V. Svarc, who would establish a ‘Slav Press Bureau’, to be the centrepiece of the operation. They left for Petrograd via Tokyo and the Trans-Siberian Railway shortly before Maugham, and arrived on 2 September.6 Within a week the Press Bureau had been established, as a channel not merely for Czechoslovak propaganda, but Yugoslav and Polish as well; Voska had held talks with the Polish nationalist leader Paderewski in New York not three hours before his departure for Petrograd. Its work can be seen in the content of the patriotic socialist press in September and October; Unity, the newspaper of Plekhanov’s group, produced a steady stream of reports on the national liberation struggle in Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, with Plekhanov himself endorsing the line they took.7
Maugham’s own preparations proper began in July, when William Wiseman organized for him a series of contacts in Russia, which highlighted the role to be played in the venture by non-Russian nationalities. Thus it was the London-based Polish nationalist Jan Horodyski who furnished him with letters of introduction for use in Petrograd and Moscow. Among other contacts made in the first days of July were Commandant Stefanik of the Czechoslovak armed forces, a close associate of Voska, and a Professor Shatsky, a close friend of the British ambassador in Petrograd. On 18 July Maugham signed for $21,000 and under the codename ‘Somerville’ set off for Russia via Tokyo, leaving the Japanese capital on 27 August.8
On arriving in Petrograd Maugham was immediately put in touch with the main protagonists of the patriotic socialist movement. Despite his various letters of introduction, his main contact was one of his own making, Sasha Kropotkin, daughter of the anarchist leader Prince Peter Kropotkin. She was married to Boris Lebedev, who had taught with Pares at Liverpool University, and she and Maugham had had a brief affair in England before the war. Now she could introduce Maugham not only to Kropotkin, but through him to Chaikovskii and Plekhanov; the same path would lead him to Kerensky – he dined once a week with him or a member of his cabinet while Sasha acted as interpreter – and Savinkov, the man who impressed him most.9
In his first report home, Maugham was clearly impressed with the scale of the Czechoslovaks’ organization and the potential it offered, over 1,200 outlets and 70,000 men all recorded on card indexes. The only problem, one that he left to a colleague to report, was that the Czechoslovak National Council had responded to the German capture of Riga by deciding to evacuate their offices to Moscow, something which hampered the smooth running of the operation.10 His initial contact had been with Masaryk, to whom he was introduced by the Czechoslovak members of his mission. Masaryk had a very negative opinion of the state of affairs in Russia: he believed that there was no longer an audience for patriotic speeches, and, presumably, was unenthusiastic about the idea of a press bureau; the situation in Russia was far worse than appeared on the surface and Japanese intervention, talked about frequently at this time, seemed the only way forward. Maugham, however, was less down-hearted and warned London that Masaryk could well have fallen under Milyukov’s spell. Indeed, Maugham at once formed a very negative impression of the Kadets; his first report home was dominated by a denunciation of the apparent presidential ambitions of liberal politician N.V. Nekrasov, who in August 1917 had been both Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister but was sidelined by Kerensky in September as Governor General of Finland – allegedly Nekrasov had ingratiated himself with the British ambassador and courted popularity by suggesting that he alone could persuade the Allies to propose a negotiated peace. Maugham added that he had been out on the streets during the Kornilov rebellion and found the crowds ‘good-natured’. They were unlikely to commit excesses and the likelihood was that, while ‘severe riots may be expected during the winter’, there would not be a separate peace.11
Maugham’s suspicions of the Kadets showed that he had grasped at once the need to distance the Allied cause from ‘Kadets and counter-revolutionaries’. He reported:
I have seen complaints that the foreign correspondents give news coloured exclusively by Kadet and counter-revolutionary opinions. I would suggest that it would be well worth while if the radical views were put as sympathetically as possible. The idea that the ambassadors and the press are entirely supporting one side is very galling to many Russians, and this partiality may very well defeat its own aim. At any rate to this is due much of the unpopularity from which the Allies are now suffering.12
Increasingly his views became paraphrases of those of the Popular Socialist and right-wing SR circles in which he mixed: if the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Democratic Conference they would seize power, with the connivance of reactionary forces, and Kerensky would go to GHQ; after a week-long reign of terror the Bolsheviks would be driven from power, but the power of the reactionary right would be strengthened. Despite this chaos theory, Maugham remained optimistic: ‘Petrograd is heartily sick of agitations and next outbreak of Maximalists (as he termed the Bolsheviks) may be anticipated to be their last. Situation looks more hopeful for the future’, he stated in a report dated 21 September.13 (All his reports were dated according to the western calendar.) Kerensky’s success at the Democratic Conference clearly impressed Maugham still further. While the report of 19 September stressed Kerensky’s loss of popularity, that of 29 September noted Kerensky’s chances of retaining power were much greater, since his enemies had no-one with whom to replace him. Partly this was put down to the success of Kerensky’s War Minister Verkhovskii who ‘has grown much less socialistic since his appointment’, and seemed to be ready to reorganize the army.14
Verkhovskii did indeed become an enthusiastic supporter of the sort of army reform envisaged by Maugham and his slav team. Under Verkhovskii not only were the last objections to the formation of a Czechoslovak Legion dropped, but he began a veritable campaign to ‘nationalize’ the army in order to reinvigorate it – for only volunteers joined these ‘foreign’ army units and there were no soldiers’ committees to sap morale. Working closely with the French military attaché General Niessel, Verkhovskii, despite opposition from some fellow ministers, began to encourage the formation of Ukrainian, Polish, South Slav and Czechoslovak units. The gist of the scheme was put to the autonomous government in the Ukraine, where the Czechoslovak Legion was based, just before Kerensky’s overthrow: General Tabouis and Major Fitzwilliams, the French and British military representatives in Kiev respectively, told A. Shulgin, the putative Ukrainian Foreign Minister, that Ukrainian forces should be attached to the Army of Romania, while the Polish Corps and the Czechoslovak Legion should join any cossack forces concentrating on the Don; these would be the core of a new army.15 In the week before the Bolshevik seizure of power Masaryk, presumably with Verkhovskii’s support, had talks in Kiev with Polish and cossack leaders on the subject of military co-operation.16
As the Democratic Conference gave way to the Preparliament, Maugham continued to exude confidence. He was dismissive of rumours: Voska had been in Kiev when there were supposed to have been riots, and there were no riots; the food supply in Petrograd, now that the city council had taken over responsibility for it, was looking up.17 This assessment then changed dramatically when his report of 10 October stated that although a Third Coalition Government had been formed, it was not expected to last more than three weeks; trouble would come when the Congress of Soviets assembled, which was now ‘completely under the control of the extreme left’. This sudden change of heart was brought about by a report from Voska which described the total collapse in morale of the Russian Army.18
Even so, Maugham and his team were not despairing, and their reports were soon more up-beat. Early in October Maugham met Savinkov, someone who made an extraordinary impression on him. As he recalled many years later:
The deliberation of his speech, the impressive restraint of his manner, suggested a determined will which made his ruthlessness comprehensible. I had come across no one who filled me with so great a sense of confidence.19
His report to Wiseman on 19 October stated:
In the course of long conversation with me Savinkov, lately Minister for War, said as follows:
a) He is trying to form strong centre party, consisting of co-operative societies, populists, moderate policy socialists and cossacks in Preparliament. Kadets will form right and Bolsheviks the left. Programme of the new party is abolition of soviet committees on the front, reorganization of the army and continuation of the war. Important newspapers will be issued to support policy.
b) He thinks this party will be strong enough to force above mentioned abolition peacefully, but if there is no time to organize it civil war inevitable.
c) Notwithstanding contrary announcement there is no intention to convoke national assembly before the end of the war.20
The degree to which Savinkov’s ideas were taken on board by Maugham’s team can be seen from a report sent by Voska on the very eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power, after he had left Petrograd. The current government was weak and could be brought down by the soviet at any moment.
It is necessary for the Allies to be prepared for such an eventuality. They should not, however, rely upon the bourgeois parties, but upon the popular leaders of democratic socialism who will surely finally defeat the anarchistic socialism which is doomed to failure.
In another proposal submitted the same day he took up the theme of Savinkov’s proposed centre party as ‘the only way out of the present anarchy’.21
In his report of 16 October Maugham finally forwarded to Wiseman the plan he had drawn up in consultation with Masaryk. These were to maintain the Slav Press Bureau as a cover for more covert operations, at the cost of $25,000 per annum. Some of the details of its operation were spelt out in a subsequent report by one of the members of Maugham’s mission, Koukol:
Besides our own workers, we planned to have an advisory committee composed of some of the most prominent Russian journalists and political leaders. I had already secured the co-operation of the following men: Professor Yastrebov of Petrograd University; Nikolai Sokolov, a close friend of Prof. Milyukov and co-editor of Rech (the Kadet daily); Pitirin Sorokin, a prominent Social Revolutionist and a member of the editorial staff of Volya naroda; Vladimir Burtsev; and Professor Adrianov … to act as the Russian Director of the Bureau [and former] assistant editor of the official Petrograd Telegraph Agency.
The bureau would establish three departments under men drawing salaries of 500 francs per month each: department 1 would distribute well-illustrated literature in all the languages of Russia, as well as regular Allied propaganda (cost, $25,000 per annum); department 2 would send speakers to all public meetings, as well as organizing meetings (cost, $50,000 per annum); and department 3 would ‘support moderate socialist party known as Menshevik’, and launch a new anti-Bolshevik paper at the front, as well as subsidizing other newspapers (cost, $150,000 per annum). Maugham warned that Masaryk was insistent that any lesser sum would be a waste of money, and would only participate if these terms were met.
In a subsequent report Maugham made clear that the Slav Press Bureau would involve others than the Czechoslovaks. Polish and Yugoslav representatives had also been sent to Russia in the summer of 1917, and ‘a second branch of the organization would concern Poles in Russia, and be run entirely by them, but supervised by our chief agent [Maugham] and partly financed by us’.22 A probable part of Maugham’s operation was discussed in a US intelligence report, dated January 1918, which described how:
early in October we organized a Polish deputation which called on Kerensky to endeavour to persuade him to agree to the formation of an absolutely independent state under the guarantee of the Allies, with the capital at Minsk to be defended by Polish troops. Kerensky favoured the plan, but was too weak to put it into operation although the Poles themselves began to concentrate their forces at Minsk from that time on.23
Finally, Maugham reported, in addition to these two branches, there would be ‘a special sector organization’, working separately and ‘recruited from Poles, Czechoslovaks and cossacks’. This organization would have the chief object of unmasking German plots and propaganda in Russia and would be headed by Voska. Presumably it would also be responsible for covert operations. Maugham sought and got authorization to lift the earlier ban on contacts with British agents so he could co-operate with the British Intelligence officer operating in Petrograd; he also tried to get an agent placed within the ‘secret meetings’ of the Bolshevik Party. By November American Intelligence did claim to have established such an (un-named) agent within the Bolshevik Party.24
The response of Wiseman to the project was enthusiastic – there clearly was potential in the tactic of supporting both patriotic socialists and oppressed slav nationalities – but also cautious; Maugham’s proposals were expensive. Wiseman had already suggested to Maugham on 17 October that they should meet in London some time between the middle of November and the middle of December to discuss the mission: on 21 October, having digested Maugham’s report of the 16th more fully, he asked whether too much of the scheme did not depend on Masaryk and the slavs; Maugham should definitely meet him in London ‘about 10 November’ for consultations.25 Aware that Maugham was planning to visit London, Kerensky contacted him precisely one week before the Bolshevik seizure of power with a request that he take a message to Lloyd George. Maugham set off just five days before the Bolshevik insurrection and arrived in London on 18 November.
The fate of this message did much to introduce an element of cloak and dagger farce into Maugham’s mission. Kerensky’s biographer Richard Abraham described the incident as follows:
To keep this message safe (from the Germans or from Tereshchenko?) Maugham was instructed to write nothing down, an instruction broken only after his arrival in London. The British took every precaution to ensure that the message arrived in total secrecy, sending a destroyer to Christiana to pick Maugham up, but it did not reach Lloyd George until November 18.26
In reality, Maugham was planning to return home at this time on Wiseman’s orders, and Kerensky’s message itself was fairly routine. Although it did contradict Kerensky’s public stance on some matters, it only confirmed what was well known to be the policy of the Kerensky government in diplomatic circles – that they were unhappy with the level of British military supplies, unhappy with Allied press coverage, and keen for the Allies to offer the Germans ‘peace without annexations or compensations’, in other words a peace ‘the Germans would refuse’; only if the Germans rejected such peace terms could Russian soldiers be persuaded to go on fighting. Ironically, Kerensky also criticized Buchanan and asked for his replacement, unaware that Buchanan had been urging the Allies to make the self-same peace offer.27
Masaryk Activates the Maugham Plan
When Maugham arrived in London on 18 November he found a willing audience in the British Cabinet. The day after his arrival he, Wiseman and their Polish Nationalist contact Jan Horodyski had urgent talks, and on 20 November the British cabinet minister Sir Edward Carson and the Director of Military Intelligence General Macdonagh were brought into the discussions. As a consequence, Carson told the British Cabinet on 21 November that ‘he believed that the formation of a nucleus of Poles, Cossacks, Romanians and Armenians [Carson inexplicably omitted the Czechoslovaks from this list although they clearly featured in Maugham’s plan] was a practical proposition, which might be realized, should we be able to get at General Kaledin through the Romanians’.28
Further evidence of the viability of a link between the Czechoslovaks and the cossacks appeared to come in a telegram sent by Buchanan on 23 November in which he explained how he had been contacted by a group of bankers acting on behalf of Kaledin. This telegram was discussed by the cabinet on 26 November, and the idea was enthusiastically taken up. The same day Sir Edward Carson contacted Buchanan asking for more details. Buchanan sent back a very sceptical reply,29 but the cossack myth had seized the cabinet. When full discussion began in the cabinet on 29 November, Buchanan’s suggestion that the Russians be freed from their obligation to continue fighting was severely criticized by Acting Foreign Secretary Lord Robert Cecil, who spoke enthusiastically about the support gathering around Kaledin. When the cabinet next discussed the matter on 3 December it was decided to inform Buchanan that the War Cabinet considered the only thing to do was to ‘strengthen by every means in our power those elements who are genuinely friendly to the Entente of whom the chief are Kaledin, Alekseev and their group’. Therefore any funds needed to support the cossacks would be authorized, ‘no regard should be made to expense’.30
However, Kaledin’s operation was more myth than reality. Some three weeks after the October seizure of power General Alfred Knox, initially a supporter of Kaledin, informed the Director of Military Intelligence in London that Kaledin would never be able to undertake offensive operations. A few days after this Knox was to complain about the ‘talkers’ from the Don who continually ‘pestered the embassy’, while Buchanan stated clearly that: ‘the forces at Kaledin’s and Alekseev’s disposal are not sufficient to engage in any serious enterprise, and it is useless to found exaggerated expectations on overtures made to us by their emissaries’.31
As Allied representatives made contact with these groups, these doubts were confirmed. More and more negative reports arrived; thus in a report dated 7 December London was informed that ‘the cossacks [are] absolutely useless and disorganized’, while Lieutenant-Colonel Jacks’s report on 31 December stated that Kaledin’s forces were insignificant and fit only to defend their existing territory. General de Candolle reported on 6 January that the so-called South East Union, based in Ekaterinodar, ‘constituted the merest embryo of political authority’, and ‘passive resistance’ was the most that could be expected from Novocherkassk. By the end of February, detailed reports from Novocherkassk showed that recruitment to the Volunteer Army was proceeding at half the estimated rate and that a total of only 3,000 men had been assembled. The Allies were not surprised when the Don country fell to the Red Army.32
The weakness of Maugham’s strategy was the link he made between the Czechoslovaks and the cossacks. This had long been a source of tension between him and the Czechoslovak leader Masaryk, for if the Czechoslovaks were to co-ordinate their actions with the cossacks, they would have to be moved from their base near Kiev to the extreme south and west, linking in one direction to the Don cossacks and in the other to Romania. Despite their close contacts during September and October, relations between Maugham and Masaryk were not free from tension. One of the characters in Maugham’s Ashenden novels noted that it was occasionally necessary to get around ‘the professor’s’ scruples by keeping him in the dark, and in the real life drama, Maugham’s agent Voska, the head of the Slav Press Bureau, bypassed Masaryk to pay two visits to the Czechoslovak headquarters in Kiev. Masaryk’s scruples were to be the one weak spot in the patriotic socialist strategy: he, apparently unlike Maugham, had no confidence in Romania, could see no point in keeping Romania in the war, and certainly did not want his forces transferred to the south west front. When at the end of October the Allies proposed just this, Masaryk visited the Romanian headquarters at Jassy and the Romanian front, but prevaricated; Kerensky’s fall gave him the perfect opportunity to refuse the request.33
Masaryk was no more co-operative at the end of November 1917 when the logic of the Maugham strategy being adopted in London called on him once again to sandwich his troops between the Romanians and the cossacks. The King of Romania had told the British and French governments that he was prepared to try and keep his resistance to the Germans going by forcing a passage through to link up with the Don cossacks, if he could rely on Allied support. When the Czechoslovak forces were asked if they would move to occupy the territory between Bessarabia and the Don, however, Masaryk refused, ignoring the apparent support for the scheme from General Alekseev.34 Masaryk was determined to pursue a ‘Ukrainian’ strategy. His legion was based there, and the Ukrainian government was made up of the sort of moderate socialists and nationalists to whom Masaryk could relate. He favoured the formation of Ukrainian, Polish and Czechoslovak armies within the Ukraine which would co-operate with Romania but not get sucked into joint action with a country which was doomed and cossacks whose strength was imagined rather than real. For Masaryk’s own contacts with the Don had been as negative as those of Britain; he sent a close confidant to contact Alekseev and he returned with a negative report which served only to reinforce Masaryk’s lack of faith in Alekseev, despite the fact that some Czechoslovaks were members of Kornilov’s regiment and had followed him to the Don. Masaryk ignored Alekseev’s request to send troops to the Don at the end of November, and a second request was intercepted by the Bolsheviks in late January. Only in mid-February did he allow a sapper battalion to join those Czechoslovaks already on the Don.35
Masaryk was convinced that the Czechoslovaks were strategically better placed in the Ukraine than on the Don, and explained to Alekseev that this would be even more the case when a Polish army had been formed. With the active support of the French, who were prepared to drop the order sending the Czechoslovaks to the Romanian front, the Ukrainian government and Masaryk developed a version of the Maugham strategy which recognized the collapse of Romania. By the end of December there were detailed plans for two Czechoslovak legions, supported by a Polish corps and a Serb corps, which would stay in the Ukraine and become the nucleus of a new army for Russia. Masaryk would build in the Ukraine the force he and Maugham had tried to construct in Russia as a whole, and on 5 January 1918 a key step forward was taken when he and the Poles signed an operational agreement for their two armed forces. Niessel, the French military attaché, showed his full support for Masaryk when he bypassed official channels to try and get all Polish forces concentrated in the Ukraine.36
The British attitude to this Ukrainian version of the Maugham plan was perhaps best summed up on 3 January 1918 by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff in a memorandum to the War Cabinet:
I do not see at present that more can be done than that of which the War Cabinet is aware, namely, to make the best use of the forces in South Russia which are more or less willing to co-operate with the Entente. There is the Romanian Army of fifteen divisions which merely requires supplies and perhaps these may be obtained, given the goodwill of the Ukrainian government. The latter is collecting Little Russian (Ukrainian) troops from different parts of the front and has the support of two Czechoslovak divisions now about Kiev. Its special need is money and organization and these will be furnished by the French. In the Polish Army a force of over 32,000 rifles which may perhaps be increased seven or eight times that number and which is now being supplied with money through Gen Niessel.
Such forces, based in the Ukraine, could form a bridge to Alekseev on the Don.37
Politically, however, the attitude of the British to Masaryk’s Ukrainian policy was a little ambivalent. British representation in Kiev was strengthened in the first week of January by sending to the Ukrainian capital Mr Picton-Bagge as official ‘representative’ and Lady Muriel Paget, of the British Hospital in Petrograd; she had experience of Kiev having been there in the summer of 1916. However, the British were clear there was to be no recognition of the Ukraine and the cabinet’s Russian Committee was only lukewarm about following what it described as this ‘French’ policy. Indeed, so as to avoid Bolshevik accusations of arming the Ukrainians, the British moved their detachment of armoured cars from Kiev to Kursk, where they were promptly requisitioned by the Bolsheviks. Yet as the Russian Committee noted ‘in spite of doubts as to the real power of the Rada, we must be ready to back the French’ and, because of a French cash shortage, it was the British who provided Masaryk with his money in Kiev. The British military advisor on the spot, General de Candolle, supported Masaryk’s contention that the Czechoslovak Legion was better placed where it was near the Poles than on the Don.38
From the very start Masaryk’s scheme was confronted with two problems. First, he talked about using the Ukraine as a base to reform the Russian Army and was convinced that the Constituent Assembly elections would result in the formation of an SR government ready to resume the war, alongside the similar government already established by the Rada in Kiev. Perhaps he had heard an over-optimistic report from his friend Sorokin, closely involved in the Maugham operation, who was a member of the committee which tried to open the Constituent Assembly on 28 November and an active member of the SR commission preparing for the opening on 5 January 1918; perhaps he knew too of the SR plans agreed on 26–27 December 1917 to approach the Rada about forming a new federal Russian state. By the first week in January it was clear that this was a pipe dream. Second, even before their participation in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, Masaryk found problems when confronting the nationalism of the Ukrainian authorities. Although he was allowed to hold an ‘Oppressed Nations Rally’ in Kiev on 12 December, which brought together Poles, Czechs, Slovenes, Slovaks and Serbs, when it came to the Polish forces, he found himself trying to mediate between the rival Ukrainian and Polish claims to Galicia.39
When Masaryk finally signed an accord with the Ukrainian government on 16 January 1918 it was an ambivalent one. If the Ukraine declared war on the Central Powers at the end of the armistice, then the Czechoslovaks would rally to the Ukrainian Army; if they did not the Czechoslovaks would leave the country. As Ukrainian nationalists gained the upper hand over the socialists in the Rada and agreed to send a delegation to Brest-Litovsk, the Ukrainian option seemed doomed. The head of the French military mission General Niessel had been convinced since early January that the tactic had run into the sand, although officially the French support continued. By the end of January Masaryk had lost patience with the Ukrainian government: when they asked if he would allow his Czechoslovak Legion to be used to police Kiev, he said this would only be possible if war was declared on the Central Powers.40
What finally ended Masaryk’s dream of a Ukrainian version of the Maugham mission was the demise of the Polish Corps. It was Kornilov who in the summer of 1917 had given permission for the various Polish forces in Russia to be formed into a corps, led by Lieutenant-General Dowbor Musnicki; like the Czechoslovak Legion, there were to be no soldiers’ committees in the Polish Corps. Dowbor Musnicki was impatient with politicians. Despite Verkhovskii’s sympathy to the cause of national brigades, Dowbor Musnicki convinced himself that the government was against the idea and at the end of October instructed his supporters to expand the size of the corps without waiting for government permission. He was even more intolerant of the Bolsheviks, moving his cavalry to Minsk, which Kerensky had been considering using as the embryo of a future Polish state, and using his forces there to protect the local Polish gentry from the land-hungry Byelorussian peasants. To enforce their land distribution policy the Bolsheviks made several attempts to disarm individual Polish units.
Things came to a head on 11 January 1918 when Dowbor Musnicki declared that if any attempts at disarmament occurred after 12 a.m. on 12 January, the Polish Corps would resist. Thus the Poles and the Bolsheviks found themselves in a state of war over an essentially trivial and private matter, at a time when Masaryk was desperately trying to co-ordinate the activity of the Poles with that of his Czechoslovak Legion. Dowbor Musnicki acted on the assumption that the Bolsheviks would be unable to crush him because of the slow progress of Muraviev’s advance into the Ukraine, which would enable the Poles, if necessary, to retreat to the Ukraine where the Second Polish Uhlan Regiment was being formed. Both assumptions proved wrong: his emissaries sent to the Ukraine never arrived and so could not negotiate his retreat there, and Muraviev succeeded in seizing Kiev far more quickly than he anticipated. By 21 January the Polish Corps was surrounded by the Bolsheviks in the fortress at Bobruisk and quite unable to help Masaryk form the core of a pro-Allied army in Kiev.41 Indeed, they ended up playing a pro-German role. When the Brest-Litovsk negotiations broke down and the Germans renewed their advance on 18 February, Dowbor Musnicki’s forces were trapped between the advancing Germans and the Red Army. Dowbor Musnicki felt he had no choice but to sign an agreement with the advancing Germans and seize Minsk on their behalf on 19–20 February 1918.42
Not Maugham, Nor Masaryk But Muraviev
In the Ukraine, however, the German advance breathed new life into the Masaryk scheme, with reinforcements arriving in the most unexpected of guises. As Muraviev’s forces took Kiev in the first week of February 1918, overturning the government of patriotic socialists and nationalists on whom Masaryk placed so much hope and imposing the Ukrainian Soviet Government first formed in Kharkov, Allied representatives were astounded to find Muraviev quite willing to ally himself with the Czechoslovak Legion in a joint struggle against Germany and Austria. The possibility of an alliance with the Bolsheviks, of turning them into patriotic socialists fighting alongside the Czechoslovaks against the Germans was suddenly opened up. Muraviev, despite his reputation for being the most ruthless of Red commanders, was a patriotic socialist of the first calling; when Muraviev arrived in Kiev the astonished British representative Mr Picton-Bagge recognized his former partner in the men’s doubles at the previous years’ Odessa tennis tournament.43 Muraviev first came to the attention of British policy-makers in July 1917 when, encouraged by Bernard Pares, he became the chairman of the League of Personal Example, a socialist group in the army committed to the formation of volunteer brigades. In carrying out this work he clashed with the reactionary officers of the General Staff, and called upon Pares to try and smooth things over. Described by Pares even then as ‘an extreme SR’, he rapidly became disillusioned with Kerensky; after the Kornilov rebellion he joined the Left SRs.44
Muraviev’s bitterness against the officer corps of the old army led him to rally to the support of Lenin’s coup. He volunteered to lead the Bolshevik forces at the battle of Pulkovo Heights, when General Krasnov and his cossacks tried to march on Petrograd, and his subsequent attempt to put Petrograd under martial law led to an outcry in the Soviet Executive. His fiery temperament was displayed again when he organized the Bolshevik Commander-in-Chief Krylenko’s advance on GHQ, which led to General Dukhonin’s assassination; it was Muraviev who pulled Dukhonin’s epaulettes from his uniform. He then joined Antonov-Ovseenko in the mid-December campaign in the Eastern Ukraine. There, at meetings of the Supreme War Council in Odessa, he met the British agent George Hill and shortly afterwards the French agent Captain Bordes. Despite his temperament, he made a good impression on all the military men who met him; a British government Eastern Report for 21 February 1918, produced in London for the cabinet, spoke in awesome tones of the Bolshevik commander Muraviev ‘whose orders are obeyed and who enforces discipline’; this was the first time this had happened since the abdication of the Emperor, the report concluded.45
It was as Chief Commander of the Ukrainian campaign that Muraviev arrived in Kiev on 10 February 1918 and held talks with the Allied military attachés General Tabouis and Major Fitzwilliams, two Serbian colonels, and Masaryk, who acted as interpreter. Muraviev explained that the soviet campaign against the Ukrainian Rada had been necessary because of the reactionary nature of that regime. However, somewhat to their surprise, Muraviev then presented the Allies with the following plan: he agreed with Masaryk that the Czechoslovak Legion should be concentrated in order to attain a greater mobility, but then, he said, it should be deployed together with the Polish Corps on the northern flank of the Romanian front to be ready when Austria struck; this was precisely what the British General de Candolle had been suggesting in his reports to London.
Muraviev stressed that this plan was his personal initiative and Petrograd still had to be consulted. However, the caution of Petrograd was not the only problem the plan faced. The very mention of the Romanian front was enough to turn Masaryk against the idea. He was adamant that his troops were not going to the Romanian front and insisted that the time had now come for the Czechoslovak Legion to leave for France. Muraviev acquiesced and, far from turning aggressive at the rejection of his proposal, promised to take over responsibility for supplying the legion until their departure could be arranged.46 On 18 February 1918 the French liaison officer with the Czechoslovak Legion, A. Verge, informed Masaryk that the funds had arrived to begin the journey to Vladivostok.
The very same day, however, the Germans began their advance and Muraviev again turned to the Czechoslovak Legion commanders to ask for help. Talks took place on 19 February 1918 between Masaryk’s closest associates and the Czechoslovak Legion’s Russian commander General Diteriks on the one hand, and the army commanders of the new Ukrainian Soviet Government on the other. The agreement which was reached greatly benefitted the Czechoslovaks, for under it they were not to be isolated near Romania, but stationed close to the border with Russia: the Red Army was to bear the brunt of the German advance, but, if their front held, the Czechoslovak Legion would launch a counter-offensive; if, on the other hand, the front did not hold, the Czechoslovaks would be well placed to retreat into Russian territory and resume their journey to France via Siberia.47
General Tabouis who endorsed the scheme on 21 February 1918 was greatly impressed by Muraviev’s ‘enthusiasm to resist Berlin’. However, it was all to no avail. Patriotic socialists and Czechoslovak legionaries fought side by side as Maugham and Masaryk had dreamed they would, but the front against the Germans rapidly disintegrated and on 22 February 1918 Muraviev put Masaryk, Fitzwilliams and Tabouis on a train to Moscow. Masaryk left Russia for good on 7 March 1918.48 Back in the Ukraine Muraviev’s Red Army and the Czechoslovak Legion were left to fight their way out of the Ukraine. As they did so they met the British agent George Hill who, once it had become clear that a military stand was hopeless, began organizing detachments of guerrilla partisans who would stay and work behind the lines.49 On 8 March 1918 more talks were held between the Ukrainian Soviet and Czechoslovak forces, and, despite some mutual hostility, an agreement was reached which resulted in the two armies again fighting side by side at the Battle of Bakhmach on 15 March 1918, where the German forces were temporarily held in check.
Indeed, at the time of this battle it looked momentarily as if the Russian Red Army was determined to confront German operations in the Ukraine and would support this alliance of patriotic socialists. On 12 March 1918 the British learned that Trotsky was pledged to war in the Ukraine. In a newspaper interview of 16 March 1918 Trotsky stressed ‘we are still continuing the war with Germany in the Ukraine’. Niessel recalled in his memoirs that he had been reliably informed that both Trotsky and Lenin judged German operations in the Ukraine to be inadmissible and were determined to defend a Soviet Ukraine; and the minutes of the Bolshevik Central Committee confirmed that a decision was taken on 15 March 1918 to establish a ‘united defence front’, although the linked decision to flood the Donbas mines suggested that there was little optimism about military success. This turned out to be the case and shortly afterwards Muraviev was recalled from the Ukraine; apparently in his enthusiasm for opposing the Central Powers he had been willing to consider joint resistance with the remnants of the Rada’s army which he had so recently defeated.50
Balfour Revises British Policy
With the recall of Muraviev and the return of Masaryk, the Maugham mission had run its course. The British government’s response to the Bolshevik seizure of power had been confused and ambiguous since the crucial decision of 3 December 1917 to intervene in support of Kaledin was taken in the absence of the Foreign Secretary A.J. Balfour, who was attending the Inter-Allied Conference in Paris, and in the teeth of the diplomatic reports being sent by the British ambassador Sir George Buchanan. These messages were clear, if in many ways unpalatable: Buchanan rejected all contact with counter-revolutionary groups and favoured the formation of a coalition socialist government; when that failed to materialize, he called for de facto recognition of a Bolshevik dominated government; but above all Buchanan favoured peace talks.
Thus, while the British military attaché Alfred Knox doubted whether the moderate socialists still had a chance and initially preferred to look to Kaledin as the agent to remove the Bolsheviks,51 Buchanan was always sceptical about Kaledin and the counter-revolution. Reporting to London two days after the Bolshevik coup that he had been contacted secretly by Rodzianko who had asked for help, Buchanan had ‘begged he would only act in conjunction with the CSRM as any attempt at a counter-revolution with which his name was so closely connected might under the present circumstances cause moderate socialists to join the Bolsheviks’. Buchanan’s report on the opening of the Railway Workers’ Union talks, on the other hand, was optimistic, commenting that ‘it would appear that the proposal is favourably regarded by the majority’.52
A week after the coup Buchanan had talks with Kerensky’s War Minister Verkhovskii, who was nominated to the same position in the socialist coalition government planned by the Railway Workers’ Union, and there was a hint of embarrassment in Buchanan’s response to Verkhovskii’s request for the Allies to present peace terms to Germany; he replied ‘they [the British government] were unlikely to go as far as he wished them to’. He informed London that ‘as far as peace terms were concerned there was little difference between the programme of the Bolsheviks and the moderate socialists’ and ‘unless the unexpected happens and the cossacks succeed in winning the day, we must be prepared to face the new situation. Whether the Bolsheviks are admitted into the new government or not, the real power will be in their hands.’ This was still his attitude when the Railway Workers’ Union talks stalled, and he argued for de facto recognition of the new regime by the British until the Constituent Assembly met.53
In further contacts with the moderate socialists after the collapse of the Railway Workers’ Union talks, Buchanan urged the Menshevik Skobelev to drop plans to form a coalition government ‘supported by the Kadets’ and pressed London to make the peace offer requested by the moderate socialists:
though socialist government does not inspire me with much confidence, as regards the conduct of the war it is everything for us to gain time, while the Kadets, though not represented in the new government may well be able to make their influence felt. It is to my mind of such supreme importance to keep Russia in the war as long as possible in order that Germany may not obtain supplies from her during the war or secure a predominant position here after the war that I earnestly hope the Allied Governments will consent to give the assurances asked for. Discussion of peace terms commits us to nothing, while the defection of Russia may have such serious consequences for us that we ought to stave it off as long as possible.54
Two days after his talks with Skobelev, Buchanan was visited by the Popular Socialist leader Chaikovskii and the issue of a socialist government excluding both the Bolsheviks and Chernov was discussed; a few days later he was informed that the sticking point for any agreement between the socialists and the liberals was the formers’ insistence on accepting the decrees on peace and land.55 On the eve of the cabinet’s decision on intervention, Buchanan again telegraphed the Foreign Office to express the Verkhovskii view that the Russians should be allowed a free choice as to whether or not they continued to fight:
if anything could tempt Russia to make one more effort, it would be the knowledge that she was perfectly free to act as she pleased, without any pressure from the Allies … I am not advocating any transaction with the Bolshevik government. On the contrary, I believe that the adoption of the course I have suggested will take the wind out of their sails …
This view was supported ten days later by Knox, who agreed it was ‘useless to try to hold any Russian government to the strict fulfilment of obligations which nine out of ten of the people repudiate’.56
In Balfour’s absence the cabinet was unsympathetic to such an approach. In the telegram of 3 December endorsing the policy of intervention and support for Kaledin, Buchanan was told that the government ‘do not believe that the constitution of a coalition between Bolsheviks, SRs and even Mensheviks would be any real improvement. Such a combination would be under Bolshevik influence and would besides consist of talkers and theorists.’ The only thing to do was to contact friends like Kaledin.57 However, on his return from the Inter-Allied Conference in Paris, Balfour forced through a dramatic change in policy. In a detailed memorandum written on 9 December and presented to cabinet on the 10th, Balfour attacked his cabinet colleagues and called for the decision they had taken to be changed. The view that the Bolsheviks could only be considered as avowed enemies was ‘founded on a misconception’. Any break with ‘this crazy system’ and the ‘dangerous dreamers’ who ran it had to be delayed as long as possible. ‘It is certain, I take it,’ he wrote, ‘that, for the remainder of this war, the Bolsheviks are going to fight neither Germany nor anyone else. But, if we can prevent their aiding Germany we do a great deal, and to this we should devote our efforts’.
He went on:
If we drive Russia into the hands of Germany, we shall hasten the organization of the country by German officials on German lines. Nothing could be more fatal, it seems to me, both to the immediate conduct of the war and to our post-war relations. Russia, however incapable of fighting, is not easily overrun. Except with the active goodwill of the Russians themselves, German troops (even if there were German troops to spare) are not going to penetrate many hundreds of miles into that vast country. A mere armistice between Russia and Germany may not for very many months promote in any important fashion the supply of German needs from Russian sources. It must be our business to make that period as long as possible by every means in our power, and no policy would be more fatal than to give the Russians a motive for welcoming into their midst German officials and German soldiers as friends and deliverers.58
While events were gathering momentum in the Ukraine, the British government began to follow a conciliatory strategy towards the Bolsheviks in Russia. Whatever might or might not come of the Ukraine or the ephemeral South East Union, de facto recognition of Bolshevik rule in Russia seemed essential. Meeting with the French in Paris on 23 December 1917 it was decided to keep all options open. Liaison with the Ukrainians would be left to the French and liaison with the South East Federation to the British, but more important than both these was the decision to establish relations with the Bolsheviks in Russia as soon as each country saw fit by sending out unofficial agents. The British acted at once: immediately after this meeting R.H. Bruce Lockhart, the former Consul-General in Moscow, began a series of meetings with the Prime Minister, senior cabinet ministers and senior civil servants and on 4 January 1918 was formally asked to go to Petrograd at once as the British diplomatic agent; he left on 14 January 1918 hoping to get there before the Brest-Litovsk negotiations were completed and had arrived by the end of the month.59
Thus Lockhart arrived in Petrograd at a crucial turning point for the Bolshevik regime. Lenin had wanted peace with Imperial Germany to confront the SR victors in the Constituent Assembly elections – what he termed ‘defeating the bourgeoisie in Russia’, but what actually meant provoking a Red versus Green civil war. But Trotsky had not delivered the goods; his prevarication at the Brest-Litovsk talks in the hope of encouraging the workers of Berlin and Vienna to seize power had failed. Instead of peace Lenin was faced with war, and in this war Muraviev was not alone in responding to the German advance by calling for an all-out war in alliance with any patriotic socialist groups, and slav national organizations like the Czechoslovak Legion.
Notes
1. R.F. Christian, ‘Alexis Aladin: Trudovik leader in the first Russian Duma: materials for a biography’ Oxford Slavonic Papers vol. 21 (1988), p. 148; G. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories (London 1923) vol. 2, p. 175; J.D. White, ‘The Kornilov affair: a study in counter-revolution’ Soviet Studies vol. 20 (1968), p. 190.
2. White, ‘Kornilov’, p. 190; Buchanan, Mission to Russia, vol. 2, p. 173; M. Kettle, The Allies and the Russian Collapse (London 1989), p. 50 et seq.
3. These incidental details concerning the Maugham mission are mostly taken from E. Voska, Spy and Counter-Spy (London 1941).
4. B. Pares, My Russian Memoirs (London 1931), pp. 424–63.
5. Maugham’s mission is briefly described in T. Morgan, Somerset Maugham (London 1986), pp. 226–9 and W.B. Fowler, British-American Relations 1917–18: the Role of Sir William Wiseman (Princeton 1969), pp. 114–15, who makes the point about the mission being deniable. Both these authors cite the papers of Sir William Wiseman. The William Wiseman papers are held in Yale University Library, and for this study I have consulted Boxes 9 and 10. The question of a salary is raised in a letter of Maugham to Wiseman dated 7 July 1917. All subsequent references will be given as ‘Wiseman Papers’ followed by the date of the document.
6. There is some confusion about when the mission arrived in Petrograd. Voska states it was early August in his memoirs published long after the event; in his report to the Bohemian National Alliance in March 1918, however, one of the participants in the mission, Alois Koukol, stated that they arrived early in September, two weeks before Kornilov’s attempted coup (Wiseman Papers, document dated 20 March 1918). Voska’s memoirs describe his early work in the New York émigré community.
7. Edinstvo carried articles on the Czechs, Poles or South Slavs on 12 and 13 September, 4, 6, 11, 15 and 17 October; Plekhanov’s endorsement of Masaryk was published on 20 October. For the Slav Press Bureau and the meeting with Padarewski, see Voska, Spy, p. 181 et seq. and p. 193.
8. Wiseman Papers, documents dated 3, 7, 14 and 18 July 1917.
9. For Maugham’s contacts, see Morgan, Somerset Maugham, pp. 226–9. Information about Kropotkin can be found in S.P. Turin, ‘Ot”ezd P.A. Kropotkina iz Anglii v Rossii’ Na chuzhoi storone no. 4 (Berlin/Prague 1924), p. 223 et seq.
10. Wiseman Papers, documents dated 11 September 1917 and 20 March 1918.
11. Wiseman Papers, documents dated 11 and 16 September 1917.
12. Wiseman Papers, document dated 16 September 1917.
13. Wiseman Papers, document dated 21 September 1917. The dates for all Maugham’s reports back to London are according to the Western calender.
14. Wiseman Papers, document dated 29 September 1917.
15. For Verkhovskii’s relations with General Niessel, see General H. Niessel, Le Triomphe des Bolcheviques et la Paix de Brest Litovsk (Paris 1940), p. 9. For the Ukraine, see A. Choulgine, L’Ukraine contra Moscou (Paris 1935), p. 159.
16. J.F.N. Bradley, ‘T.G. Masaryk et la revolution russe’ Etudes Slaves et Est-Europeenes vol. IX (1964), p. 14.
17. Wiseman Papers, document dated 6 October 1917.
18. Wiseman Papers, document dated 19 October 1917.
19. W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook (London 1949), p. 177.
20. Wiseman Papers, document dated 16 October 1917.
21. Wiseman Papers, document dated 6 November 1917.
22. Wiseman Papers, documents dated 16 and 21 October 1917 and 20 March 1918.
23. Wiseman Papers, document dated 19 January 1918.
24. Wiseman Papers, documents dated 19 September and 21 October 1917, and 19 January 1918.
25. Wiseman Papers, documents dated 17 and 21 October 1917.
26. R. Abraham, Alexander Kerensky (Columbia 1987), p. 298. Abraham appears inadvertently to misdate the occasion when Kerensky and Maugham met to discuss the message. He states it occurred on 1 October, when all other sources state 18 October.
27. The attitude of the British ambassador at this time is discussed in my ‘Before the fighting started’, Revolutionary Russia vol. 4 (1991). The full text of the message is in the Lloyd George papers held in the House of Lords Record Office, F 60/2/36. While Kerensky liked Buchanan and understood his ‘social patriot’ stance, his association with the Tsarist regime and monocled appearance made him an easy target for Bolshevik propaganda. He is also ridiculed unfairly in one of Maugham’s Ashenden stories.
28. Fowler, British–American Relations, p. 117; War Cabinet Minutes, CAB 23, 21 November 1917, item 16.
29. Public Records Office FO371.3018.109, 371.3018.114, 371.3018.136. Although this bankers’ telegram does not appear in CAB 24 GT series, the memoranda discussed at Cabinet, it is clear from the Carson telegram described above and a note dated 25 November attached to Buchanan’s telegram which reads ‘presumably the cabinet will consider it tomorrow’ that the bankers’ telegram was discussed in Cabinet.
30. See the copy of a telegram to Sir George Buchanan dated 3 December 1917 (western calendar) in the Lord Milner papers held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, dep 366, f. 40.
31. Milner Papers, 366, ff. 32, 34, 36–7, 45, 47, 50, 51.
32. Milner Papers, 369, ff. 35, 44–5; 366, ff. 58, 73, 92–3, 100.
33. For the need to ‘dupe’ Masaryk, note Voska’s visits described in Spy pp. 201–5. For Masaryk’s trip to Jassy, see V.M. Fie, Revolutionary War for Independence and the Russian Question (Delhi 1977), p. 189 and Bradley, ‘Masaryk’ p. 86. Masaryk’s other scruples revolved around his publicly declared stance that he would not intervene in Russian politics, and a latent desire to do so. Although he opposed Kornilov’s adventure, he did have talks with him about what might happen to his corps in the event of Kornilov’s success (see J.F.N. Bradley, La Légion Tchécoslovaque en Russie 1914–20 Paris 1965, p. 56); he also told Verkhovskii that the Czechoslovak corps would fight the internal Bolshevik enemy, see J. Kalvoda, The Genesis of Czechoslovakia (Columbia 1986), p. 208.
34. Kalvoda, Genesis, pp. 220–1; Fowler, British-American Relations, pp. 117–18.
35. Bradley, ‘Masaryk’, pp. 83–90; Bradley, Légion Tchécoslovaque, p. 65; Fie, Revolutionary War, pp. 175–9; and T.G. Masaryk, Tlie Making of a State (New York 1969), pp. 181–3.
36. Fic, Revolutionary War, pp. 160–6; and Niessel Triomphe, pp. 130–1.
37. Milner Papers, 357 f. 251.
38. Choulgine, L’Ukraine, pp. 160–1, 175–6 (Lady Muriel Paget’s earlier visit to Kiev is recalled by Sir Bernard Pares in Memoirs, p. 399); Milner Papers 364 ff. 5–6 and 366 f. 90; Niessel, Triomphe, p. 153; Masaryk Making of a State, p. 188.
39. Fic, Revolutionary War, pp. 161, 189; Bradley, ‘Masaryk’, p. 84; and Niessel Triomphe, pp. 130–1.
40. Fic, Revolutionary War, pp. 169–72; Niessel, Triomphe, p. 238.
41. V.P. Agapeev, ‘Korpus generala Dovbor-Musnitskogo’ Beloe Delo no. 4 (Berlin 1928), pp. 184–8.
42. Agapeev, ‘Korpus’, p. 189; Niessel, Triomphe, pp. 266–7; and J. Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie Soviétique, 1917–19 I (Paris 1933), p. 246.
43. W. Blunt, Lady Muriel (London 1962), p. 124.
44. Pares, Memoirs, pp. 473–6.
45. For Muraviev’s early career see D.L. Golinkov, Krakh vrazheskogo podpolya (Moscow 1971), p. 95; Niessel, Triomphe, p. 89; J.L.H. Keep (ed.) The Debate on Soviet Power, the Minutes of VTsIK, Second Convocation (Oxford 1979), p. 140 et seq; G. Hill, Go Spy the Land (London 1932), p. 167. The Eastern Report is in D. Jones, ‘Documents on British relations with Russia, 1917–18’ Canadian-American Slavic Studies vol. 7, no. 2 (1973), p. 237.
46. Fic, Revolutionary War, pp. 200–1; Milner Papers, 366 f. 90.
47. Fic, Revolutionary War, pp. 202–9.
48. Masaryk, Making of a State, pp. 187–9; Kalvoda, Genesis, pp. 244–8.
49. Hill, Go Spy, pp. 177–8.
50. For Trotsky’s attitude, see Milner Papers, 364 ff. 95–6. For Trotsky’s press interview, see Milner Papers, 364 f. 121. For Niessel, see Triomphe, p. 284. For the government, see E. Bosh, God borby: borba za vlast’ na Ukraine s aprelya 1917g. do nemetskoi okkupatsii (Moscow 1928), p. 191; and Izvestiya TsK KPSS (1989) no. 3, p. 102. Bosh, who was a leading member of the Ukrainian Soviet administration, goes into considerable detail about how Muraviev ignored the civilian government and acted with brutality and political insensitivity. The same reports were picked up by the Guardian’s Philips-Price, see My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution (London 1921), pp. 242–3, and are repeated as hearsay by Noulens in his memoirs. However, there must be a question mark over the reliability of these reports. A real personal animosity seems to have developed between Bosh and Muraviev, and the circumstances of his dismissal remain rather obscure. The worst allegations of brutality were always levelled against Muraviev’s aide rather than Muraviev himself and it is hard to reconcile the brute depicted in some accounts with the tennis player from Odessa.
51. A. Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914–17 (London 1921), p. 719; War Cabinet Memoranda, Public Records Office CAB 24 GT series, 2683 and 2761.
52. Public Records Office FO371.2999.249, 371.2999.310.
53. Public Records Office FO371.2999.323, 371.2999.347.
54. Public Records Office FO371.2999.398.
55. Public Records Office FO371.2999.407, 371.2999.433.
56. Buchanan, Mission to Russia, vol. 2, pp. 220–6; Public Records Office CAB 24 GT series, 2812.
57. See note 30 above.
58. Public Records Office CAB 23, Minutes of War Cabinet 295.
59. K. Young (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart vol. 1 (London 1973), p. 31; R.H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent (London 1946) p. 213.